New company AISeek has announced the Intia Processor, a chip designed solely for the purpose of handling artificial intelligence calculations in computer games. According to AISeek game titles optimized for the chip would see significant improvement in NPC AI and allow for more realistic behaviors.

From Ars Technica:

AIseek will offer an SDK for developers that will enable their titles to take advantage of the Intia AI accelerator. According to the company, Intia works by accelerating low-level AI tasks up to 200 times compared to a CPU doing the work on its own. With the acceleration, NPCs will be better at tasks like terrain analysis, line-of-sight sensory simulation, path finding, and even simple movement. In fact, AIseek guarantees that with its coprocessor NPCs will always be able to find the optimal path in any title using the processor.

Intia will enable developers to support much larger maps, including the possibility of dynamically changing maps that the NPCs could then adapt to. AIseek's hope is that use of Intia will result in the "creation of new game worlds that are based on large, rapidly changing environments."

AISeek's website provides a handful of demo movies, but as of yet offers no date for when Intia might be shipping or available to developers.